I know those feels. My long-dead attempt at cyberpunk-ish noir, which was going to be a sort of near-future Heat-meets-Count Zero, now finds itself set a couple years in the past. And it begins with our protagonist's pager going off and him walking over to the pay phone to call the number.

It's funny, because by 2012, payphones were already pretty much a reliable sign of a bad neighborhood. And a pager? Who has those anymore?.